Benin

British/Dutch East India companies

Private trading companies chartered by the governments of England and the Netherlands around 1600; they were given monopolies on Indian Ocean trade, including the right to make war and to rule conquered peoples.

Hurons

Indian Ocean Trade Network

The massive interconnected web of commerce in premodern times between the lands that bordered on the Indian Ocean (including East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia); the network was disrupted by Portuguese intrusion beginning around 1500.

Piece of eight

Potosi

City that developed high in the Andes (in present-day Bolivia) at the site of the world's largest silver mine and for a time was the largest city in the Americas, with a population of some 160,000 in 1570s.

Samurai

Shogun

Silver drain

Term often used to describe the siphoning of money from Europe to pay for the luxury products of the East (tea, silk, porcelain), a process exacerbated by the fact that Europe had few trade goods that were desirable in Eastern markets other than silver.

Soft Gold

Nickname used in the early modern period for animal furs, highly valued for their warmth and as symbols of elite status; in several regions (N. America, Siberia), the fur trade generated massive wealth for those empires engaged in it.

Spanish Philippines

An archipelago of Pacific islands (over 2000 inhabited) colonized by Spain in a relatively bloodless process that lasted a century (1565-1665), a process accompanied by converting large numbers of the local population to Christianity.